(What) Is This An Ad (For)?

29 Nov 2025 advertising · internet

Everything on the internet is an ad for something today. Short videos send people where they can buy clothes, cosmetics, accessories, or install mobile apps. Longer videos try to get people to buy outdated technology. Now, that this is the norm, it may be difficult to remember a time when content was not like this. Casey Neistat’s work on YouTube is a prime example: He started a vlog to sell the idea of his video sharing app Beme. It was a video sharing app, of which there were many already. So, he had to attach a different story and sell it in a different way. The first 100 or so videos of his vlog were an earnest attempt to get viewership, which could later be translated into Beme’s userbase. That plan didn’t quite work; Beme was eventually acquired by some big media company. Was that series of videos any different from all his recent videos where he is invariably trying to sell something?

I don’t know. I can’t really find a convincing argument that it was different. Yes, it was a longer ploy. Producing hundreds of videos in order to market some product in the future is not something one takes on lightly. The cynical take would be that it was always just that, a trick to manipulate users into forming a connection with the person first, and then selling the product. This is not unheard of, I guess it is standard sales practice? I am not that cynical. Perhaps it was a novel method of fusing art and commerce, a method which had not existed before because no compatible medium existed, but not any more cynical than other forms of advertising.

The glaring commonality among the earlier videos and the recent advertisements is the style: the writing using markers on large white canvases, the small color paper cutouts, graphs which represent various things, footage which shows all of this process, the heat gun, the spray paint, the ladder, the meticulously labeled plastic boxes full of supplies, and his studio. All of this has remained unchanged.

Take a form that was once associated with wholesome, non-commercial content, and paint it with the dull, yellowish hue of commerce. This will certainly irk viewers. The form remains distinctly recognizable, but it has lost its luster and its uniqueness.

I have not followed any other creator as closely, or for as long, as I followed Casey Neistat’s YouTube channel. So, I can’t say whether other content creators have gone through this shift. In the case of H3H3 Productions, form and content drastically changed around the same time. In the case of Johnny Harris, content changed and form evolved into something unrecognizable.

Given enough time, all content devolves into advertisement.